# [wish list]: perl stuff

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@trantor.zytor.com)
Fri, 9 Aug 1996 20:57:51 PDT

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    Followup to:  <2.2.32.19960809164457.00717fd0@vv.com>
    By author:    Quinn <quinn@vv.com>
    In newsgroup: local.moo
    >=20
    > It would be cool to have some of the anti-statements of Perl, such as
    > "unless" (if-not), and "until" (while-not), because '!' just looks real=
     ugly
    > beside some things.
    >=20

    <Grumble> I think this is just syntactic sugar...

    > <TWO>
    >=20
    > It'd also be nice to have the...
    >=20
    >         "blah" if (foo);
    >=20
    > thing, so people who don't wanna use three lines of code on...
    >=20
    >         if (foo)
    >           "blah";
    >         endif

    No PLEASE!  This is the most bogus syntactical misfeature in Perl
    after unquoted literals.  If anything, it should be:

    	if (foo) blah;

    The reversal is just plain hideously hard to wrap a programmer's brain
    around.

    >=20
    > Somewhat Perly.  The ability to reference '[a..b]' as if it were an
    > inclusive list of all integers 'a' through 'b'.  Like...
    >=20
    >         if (foo in [5..8])
    >=20
    > Rather than...
    >=20
    >         if ((foo > 4) && (foo < 9))
    >=20

    This is, by the way, hideously inefficient and would cause severe
    server spam, since you are needlessly creating a list when you don't
    need to.  Perl gets around this by having a pretty extensive
    optimizer, but developing one for MOO would be a *lot* of work.

    	-hpa
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